Notes on a Year-long Journey to the Benefits of and Tools for a Global Approach to Education
How (and WHY!) to Use This Guide
Did you know 1 in 5 high school graduates will directly encounter issues related to globalization in their career? With more access to ideas and technologies born in places far beyond their current hometown, they need to work smarter to make use of the tools available and to leverage their skills in employment scenarios that may not resemble those familiar to the current generation of teachers. If not already there, they will soon be thrust into both a work and leisure world that encourages investigating the world beyond their immediate environment, recognizing perspectives (others' and their own), communicating ideas effectively with diverse audiences, and taking action to improve conditions (taken from Educating for Global Competence). As teachers, we need to seize on the platform offered us by our positions as class guides and assist our students in finding relevancy in the courses we teach by increasing our ability to create global classrooms. Especially within humanities fields, what is most important is teaching students the relevancy of culture; of knowing their own as well as being sensitive to others. And culture goes so much deeper than the surface layers that are most visibly obvious when looking quickly only at the surface; we must direct our students deeper where the more perplexing issues lie for discovery. The graphic below illustrates a principle of culture that can help focus conversations around conversation about their own culture as a way of helping them become more reflective about others'. Putting that reflective discussion front and center, in addition to enhancing the quality of content delivery and assessment strategies to keep up with current best practices and the tools available through new technologies, we can all be thrusting our students more confidently into the global world of the present and future. Read on for the highlights from this experience, including links, documents, and rationalization for this important work.
Where is a move to global education currently embedded in Common Core Standards?
Taken from Common Core Standards for English Language Arts at the grade 9-10 level Reading Standards for Literature RL.9-10.6. Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.
This is an obvious fit with global learning, and many English Language Arts classes currently incorporate texts written from world literature. Most important to this study is to see these books as representing one aspect of that culture, or one perspective on that culture, not to see any book as representative of a whole culture or nationality. In addition, culture is a dynamic force, always changing in response to new developments or pressures, rather than a static one. I like that the language of the standard is about analyzing a "particular point of view" that gives teachers room to consider multiple points of view, either within the text or outside the text in response to the same issues. Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie presented a terrific TED Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story” which insists on keeping awake to our multiple facets; this would be very useful to present to students for discussion. By drawing on literature from outside the United States, they will be confronted with a culture different than their own, allowing them to see themselves more clearly.
Writing Standards W.9-10.6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically.
This standard directs the student to look beyond the teacher as an audience for their written work, insisting on an embrace of the widened possibilities offered through improving technology and technological savvy. Google docs is one way to meet this standard in a more limited way, but other more dynamic pathways exist. Students could publish short fiction on a site like fanfiction.net to share their work with a far-flung audience. Students could link to peers in a classroom from another town or country to share their own findings on a topic and get feedback based on a different cultural perspective. Rather than being passive receivers of information from the Internet, teachers could find ways to help students become contributors to the Internet, therefore adding relevancy to the work they create.
Speaking and Listening SL.9-10.4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task. SL.9-10.5. Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest. SL.9-10.6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate. The move is for learning to have inherent value beyond the mastery of content; that with so much content so easily available through the close presence of technology and such pressing multidisciplinary problems threatening the very fabric of our lives, the world of education needs to be harnessed to address these issues NOW in order to prepare students for a future which requires decisive action. Since global education so values the ability for students to communicate clearly AND take action to change conditions, creating public service announcements on student-chosen topics makes a nice fit for the ELA classroom. Through an analysis of rhetoric and the speaker-audience-content triangle, students can create relevant and authentic assessments of their ability to wield language effectively to meet a stated purpose. These standards also embrace alternative skill sets, such as visual literacy and the tools to create effective digital media with a knowledge of how much more effective arguments presented in multimedia fashion can be. In addition, by having a product that lends itself to being shared with peers (if not an entire school community), the student may have the opportunity to create real change in their community, bringing value to the time invested in their pursuit of success.
What are the current trends and technology used in global education and available at CHRHS?
Our district is enviably rich when it comes to technology, both in raw systems capability as well as in-house knowledge and use of a myriad of tools to assist planning,execution, and assessment of student learning. Below are some highlights of a digital learning inventory conducted at CHRHS in the fall of 2011.
We have deep hardware available for academic use. Teachers and students all have access to 13" MLTI MacBooks loaded with rich software for creating documents, graphs, spreadsheets, movies, music, presentations...it is endless. Two computer labs hold banks of computers used for video editing and architecture classes. Several printers are available for student use throughout the building. Ten or more classroom are equipped with interactive whiteboards. Within the school students have access to videocameras where applicable to classroom projects. We could still be leveraging these resources more to maximize the advantages to be gained.
At least 75% of faculty currently maintain some online presence, including wikispaces, links to iCal subscription information, and course documents. All teachers use GradeBook for electronic grade recording. Parents have access to student schedules and current grades through internet-based PowerSchool.
The Tech PLC continues their good work to foster conversations around technology use in a collaborative forum and remains open to new membership
Led by the math department, we are still in the initial stages of creating a rubric to help collect data about students' technology literacy to help provide for further development
Teachers are using...Google Docs for collaborative writing, project work, and presentation creation
Teachers are using...Jing to capture video instruction
Teachers are using...Bento to manage data, including student goals, meeting of course standards, and contact information
Teachers are using...Google Earth to enliven discussions about geography and mapping
Teachers are using...iMovie to teach basic video editing skills as students create original public service announcements and documentary shorts
Teachers are using...Twitter to deliver scheduling and homework updates to students
What might lesson plans designed to promote a more global classroom look like?
The documents below document a series of lessons I implemented in the 2012-13 school year to encourage a deep look at local culture as a bridge to a deep look at the Igbo culture of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's classic novel, Things Fall Apart. Through a deliberate conversation about classroom culture, consideration of how differences even within a single local culture might affect how an aspect of culture (such as attitudes toward academics or dating or substance use), and thorough orientation to a novel set in a very different time and place than their own, students are more likely to be sensitized to the convergence and divergence of cultural attitudes between their own world and that of the characters. A similar opening sequence could work for other teachers to deepen perspectives and awaken curiosity.
Where can teachers look for international project-based learning opportunities?
I'll share here two terrific starting resources for incorporating global learning into the classroom: iEARN is a non-profit organization made up of over 30,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 130 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies, with over 2 MILLION students each day engaged in collaborative project work! Projects from other global educators invite online collaboration and teachers can also post their own projects to invite similar collaborations.
Kiva is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people thorugh lending to alleviate poverty. Kiva lets individuals (or classrooms) lend to individuals or groups with financial need and specific investment plans, creating meaningful links between studies about particular parts of the world or particular economic issues and real-live individuals living in that situation.
If these get you thinking, go on to check out Primary Source, offering professional development workshops and educational materials along with overseas travel fellowships, and the Choices Program, which offers curricular units.
What local community resources are available?
So many! The document below lists some of the host of organizations in Midcoast Maine already recognizing the benefits from making global connections.
Here's a preview: Camden International Film Festival, PopTech, The Camden Conference, Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations, Institute for Global Ethics, Penobscot Language School...
What tools can we use to assess students' global Education?
Dr. Fred Czarra’s “Global Education Checklist for Teachers, Schools, School Systems, and State Education Agencies” would be a useful starting place for orienting all levels of our school community around our current success with global competencies. Its systematic questions allow different groups of stakeholders to evaluate areas of strength and weakness across curricular fields and suggest areas for targeted improvement. Because it collects a number of smaller checklists oriented around a 1 through 4 rating system indicating degrees to which elements are present, each checklist could be administered to its designated group once, generating baseline data and one or two specific foci for change. When that change is implemented, the checklist could be revisited to see what new area could be targeted for continued improvement.
Following this assessment and agreed-upon small-scale plan for focused redesign, Oxfam’s “Education for Global Citizenship: A Guide for Schools” provides helpful suggestions for teachers planning new lessons, including rubrics suggesting students be assessed on knowledge and understanding, skills, and values and attitudes relating to global education. While their rubrics presume an integrated K-12 curriculum building in skills honoring diversity, challenging injustice, and strengthening empathy, elements of this rubric also suggest developmentally-appropriate curriculum that could be added that is complementary to current topics covered in high school coursework.
Participating in Teachers for Global Classrooms
Notes on a Year-long Journey to the Benefits of and Tools for a Global Approach to Education
How (and WHY!) to Use This Guide
Did you know 1 in 5 high school graduates will directly encounter issues related to globalization in their career? With more access to ideas and technologies born in places far beyond their current hometown, they need to work smarter to make use of the tools available and to leverage their skills in employment scenarios that may not resemble those familiar to the current generation of teachers. If not already there, they will soon be thrust into both a work and leisure world that encourages investigating the world beyond their immediate environment, recognizing perspectives (others' and their own), communicating ideas effectively with diverse audiences, and taking action to improve conditions (taken from Educating for Global Competence). As teachers, we need to seize on the platform offered us by our positions as class guides and assist our students in finding relevancy in the courses we teach by increasing our ability to create global classrooms. Especially within humanities fields, what is most important is teaching students the relevancy of culture; of knowing their own as well as being sensitive to others. And culture goes so much deeper than the surface layers that are most visibly obvious when looking quickly only at the surface; we must direct our students deeper where the more perplexing issues lie for discovery. The graphic below illustrates a principle of culture that can help focus conversations around conversation about their own culture as a way of helping them become more reflective about others'. Putting that reflective discussion front and center, in addition to enhancing the quality of content delivery and assessment strategies to keep up with current best practices and the tools available through new technologies, we can all be thrusting our students more confidently into the global world of the present and future. Read on for the highlights from this experience, including links, documents, and rationalization for this important work.Where is a move to global education currently embedded in Common Core Standards?
Taken from Common Core Standards for English Language Arts at the grade 9-10 levelReading Standards for Literature
RL.9-10.6. Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.
This is an obvious fit with global learning, and many English Language Arts classes currently incorporate texts written from world literature. Most important to this study is to see these books as representing one aspect of that culture, or one perspective on that culture, not to see any book as representative of a whole culture or nationality. In addition, culture is a dynamic force, always changing in response to new developments or pressures, rather than a static one. I like that the language of the standard is about analyzing a "particular point of view" that gives teachers room to consider multiple points of view, either within the text or outside the text in response to the same issues. Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie presented a terrific TED Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story” which insists on keeping awake to our multiple facets; this would be very useful to present to students for discussion. By drawing on literature from outside the United States, they will be confronted with a culture different than their own, allowing them to see themselves more clearly.
Writing Standards
W.9-10.6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically.
This standard directs the student to look beyond the teacher as an audience for their written work, insisting on an embrace of the widened possibilities offered through improving technology and technological savvy. Google docs is one way to meet this standard in a more limited way, but other more dynamic pathways exist. Students could publish short fiction on a site like fanfiction.net to share their work with a far-flung audience. Students could link to peers in a classroom from another town or country to share their own findings on a topic and get feedback based on a different cultural perspective. Rather than being passive receivers of information from the Internet, teachers could find ways to help students become contributors to the Internet, therefore adding relevancy to the work they create.
Speaking and Listening
SL.9-10.4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task.
SL.9-10.5. Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.
SL.9-10.6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.
The move is for learning to have inherent value beyond the mastery of content; that with so much content so easily available through the close presence of technology and such pressing multidisciplinary problems threatening the very fabric of our lives, the world of education needs to be harnessed to address these issues NOW in order to prepare students for a future which requires decisive action. Since global education so values the ability for students to communicate clearly AND take action to change conditions, creating public service announcements on student-chosen topics makes a nice fit for the ELA classroom. Through an analysis of rhetoric and the speaker-audience-content triangle, students can create relevant and authentic assessments of their ability to wield language effectively to meet a stated purpose. These standards also embrace alternative skill sets, such as visual literacy and the tools to create effective digital media with a knowledge of how much more effective arguments presented in multimedia fashion can be. In addition, by having a product that lends itself to being shared with peers (if not an entire school community), the student may have the opportunity to create real change in their community, bringing value to the time invested in their pursuit of success.
What are the current trends and technology used in global education and available at CHRHS?
Our district is enviably rich when it comes to technology, both in raw systems capability as well as in-house knowledge and use of a myriad of tools to assist planning,execution, and assessment of student learning. Below are some highlights of a digital learning inventory conducted at CHRHS in the fall of 2011.What might lesson plans designed to promote a more global classroom look like?
The documents below document a series of lessons I implemented in the 2012-13 school year to encourage a deep look at local culture as a bridge to a deep look at the Igbo culture of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's classic novel, Things Fall Apart. Through a deliberate conversation about classroom culture, consideration of how differences even within a single local culture might affect how an aspect of culture (such as attitudes toward academics or dating or substance use), and thorough orientation to a novel set in a very different time and place than their own, students are more likely to be sensitized to the convergence and divergence of cultural attitudes between their own world and that of the characters. A similar opening sequence could work for other teachers to deepen perspectives and awaken curiosity.Where can teachers look for international project-based learning opportunities?
I'll share here two terrific starting resources for incorporating global learning into the classroom:iEARN is a non-profit organization made up of over 30,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 130 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies, with over 2 MILLION students each day engaged in collaborative project work! Projects from other global educators invite online collaboration and teachers can also post their own projects to invite similar collaborations.
Kiva is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people thorugh lending to alleviate poverty. Kiva lets individuals (or classrooms) lend to individuals or groups with financial need and specific investment plans, creating meaningful links between studies about particular parts of the world or particular economic issues and real-live individuals living in that situation.
If these get you thinking, go on to check out Primary Source, offering professional development workshops and educational materials along with overseas travel fellowships, and the Choices Program, which offers curricular units.
What local community resources are available?
So many! The document below lists some of the host of organizations in Midcoast Maine already recognizing the benefits from making global connections.Here's a preview: Camden International Film Festival, PopTech, The Camden Conference, Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations, Institute for Global Ethics, Penobscot Language School...
What tools can we use to assess students' global Education?
Dr. Fred Czarra’s “Global Education Checklist for Teachers, Schools, School Systems, and State Education Agencies” would be a useful starting place for orienting all levels of our school community around our current success with global competencies. Its systematic questions allow different groups of stakeholders to evaluate areas of strength and weakness across curricular fields and suggest areas for targeted improvement. Because it collects a number of smaller checklists oriented around a 1 through 4 rating system indicating degrees to which elements are present, each checklist could be administered to its designated group once, generating baseline data and one or two specific foci for change. When that change is implemented, the checklist could be revisited to see what new area could be targeted for continued improvement.Following this assessment and agreed-upon small-scale plan for focused redesign, Oxfam’s “Education for Global Citizenship: A Guide for Schools” provides helpful suggestions for teachers planning new lessons, including rubrics suggesting students be assessed on knowledge and understanding, skills, and values and attitudes relating to global education. While their rubrics presume an integrated K-12 curriculum building in skills honoring diversity, challenging injustice, and strengthening empathy, elements of this rubric also suggest developmentally-appropriate curriculum that could be added that is complementary to current topics covered in high school coursework.
How can I read more about your trip to Morocco as a Teachers for Global Classrooms Fellow March 17 to 31, 2012?
You haven't read my blog yet? Wait no longer - click Morocco Travel Blog right away!
Additional Resources